Two years ago Tokyo businessman Kazushige Nishida began renting a part-time wife and
daughter.
His real wife had recently died, and six months prior his twenty-two year old daughter had
had a falling out with him and left home, cutting off all contact.
Left all alone, Nishida felt a deep loneliness which he tried to fill with time spent grabbing
drinks with friends or playing golf- yet when he came home each night he felt the loneliness
waiting for him.
Instead of getting better over time he felt worse, and in a bid to relieve his growing
loneliness he tried going to hostess clubs- clubs where Japanese men pay for the platonic
company of young women- but at the end of the night he was alone again while being out
a great deal of money.
But then he remembered a tv program featuring a company called Family Romance, a company
specializing in renting out fake family members.
Nishida immediately contacted the company and placed an order for a wife and daughter
for a quick dinner date, noting on the order form his daughter's age and his wife's physique.
For a price of about $370, Nishida got an evening dinner date with his fake daughter
and wife, during which the two asked for specific details about his real daughter and wife so
they could best approximate them.
Nishida was so pleased with the service that he immediately booked another dinner date,
their relationship growing to the point that he even left a copy of his home key at Family
Romance's office so that the duo could visit him at home.
After many months of spending time with his fake family, his fake daughter and fake wife
even helped Nishida to reconnect with his estranged daughter.
Speaking with his rented daughter allowed Nishida to see a different point of view,
and made him realize that he may perhaps had been too inflexible and cold with his real
daughter.
Eventually, Nishida reached out to his real daughter- although we’re pretty sure he
didn’t tell her about the fake family he had been spending time with during his loneliness.
Founded by Yuichi Ishii, Family Romance specializes in hiring out replacement family members for
the lonely, though they also hire out companions to act as platonic friends.
Ishii initially got the idea eleven years ago, when a friend of his who was a single
mother told him that she was having trouble getting her daughter into a competitive kindergarten
because the schools favored children whose parents were married.
Posing as the child's father, Ishii attended the school interview and though this interview
did not go well due to the child's lack of familiarity with Ishii, Ishii knew that he
had stumbled onto a great business idea.
Ishii discovered only one service, Hagemashi-tai, translated to “I want to cheer you up”,
which had started in 2006.
Founded by Ryuichi Ichinokawa, a middle-aged former salaryman with a wife and two sons,
he had been deeply disturbed by news of a stabbing at a private elementary school in
a suburb of Osaka, in which eight children were killed.
Because such incidents are rare in Japan and schools aren't equipped with proper counseling
services, Ichinokawa enrolled in a psychology course hoping to become a school counselor,
but instead he ended up launching a web site that offered counseling via email.
From there he branched out into renting relatives to lonely men and women, coming to the conclusion
that a lot of problems were caused by loneliness.
Ishii worked with Hagemashi-tai for a few years but in 2009 he left the company to start
his own, and today he runs Family Romance alongside a talent agency and a tech consultancy.
Family Romance maintains a database of about twelve hundred freelance actors, ranging from
children to young adults and even elderly actors.
Family Romance can provide you with any family member you wish, from a young child to a rebellious
teenager, to an elderly grandmother.
Most of their business though comes from big one-time jobs such as weddings or other major
social events, which makes up seventy percent of Family Romance's revenue.
The other thirty percent comes from personal relationships such as that of Kazushige Nishida.
Ishii describes the work as extremely stressful, with actors having to crawl into the skin
of different family members for various clients per week.
Having personally been in ten families at the same time prior in his career, Ishii has
since implemented a policy that no actor can play more than five roles at any time.
Many fake family members have sought out actual acting training in order to better serve their
customers, but also to help deal with the stress of having to play five different roles
simultaneously.
If you feel overwhelmed by your family in your normal life, imagine having to be five
different people to five different families all at the same time!
Surprisingly the hazards of the job don't involve violence, as Family Romance takes
care to ensure the safety of their actors.
One of the chief rules is that no actor is ever allowed to go home alone with the client,
though in Nishida's case an exception was made because two actors were involved at the
same time.
Physical contact beyond some basic hand-holding is also not allowed.
However while assault and violence are not a prominent job hazard, client dependency
definitely is.
Surprisingly though it's women who are at greater risk of becoming dependent, with between
thirty and forty percent of women who rent out husbands in ongoing relationships eventually
proposing marriage.
The most difficult dependency situations involve single mothers though, with Ishii saying,
“We can't just push them away and say 'No, we can't do that' in a cold way, because we
have a responsibility that we will play that role for a long time.”
In order to keep a client happy, and no doubt to protect their bottom line, Family Romance
takes steps in these cases such as reducing the frequency of meetings to only once every
three months.
The approach has mixed success though, with it working on some people but not others,
and occasionally relationships simply have to be terminated.
Actors might not only replace family members who are missing or dead though, with some
clients hiring out actors to replace family members that are very much alive and very
much in the picture.
One actor interviewed by The New Yorker revealed that she had been impersonating a man's wife
for seven years, with the real wife having put on weight and the hired stand-in taking
her place as the man went out with his friends.
That same actress also replaced several overweight mothers at school events, as the children
of overweight parents can be subject to severe bullying in image-conscious Japan.
Stranger still, a pregnant woman once rented a fake mother to persuade her boyfriend to
acknowledge their child, and a young man rented a fake father to ease the minds of the parents
of his pregnant lover.
Other popular hires also include the hiring of fake boyfriends by single women who have
marriage-obsessed parents.
The duo will typically fake an entire relationship to include taking photos together and perhaps
even joining in on family events or video chats with the parents.
When the parents start pushing too hard about a marriage date though the woman will eventually
say that things simply didn't work out, buying herself more time to find a real boyfriend.
Sometimes however the parents can't be put off, and in this case Family Romance and other
rent-a-family providers offer the ultimate service: an entirely falsified wedding.
For around five million yen, or about forty seven thousand dollars, a man or woman can
purchase an entirely faked wedding.
The event may include real co-workers, friends, and family members, with perhaps a fake groom
or bride, but other times the entire event is faked- and once more it's typically women
who opt for this service more than men.
In these cases the only non-actors are the bride and her parents, with every single guest,
the groom, and even the best man all paid actors.
The service is typically well worth the expense though, with every detail perfect for the
bride, to even include a tear-jerking speech by the fake best man.
However perhaps the strangest service offered by Family Romance and others is that of the
“Rental Scolder”.
Rented scolders are exactly what they sound like- individuals hired to berate the clients
that hire them.
The client will typically meet and discuss the mistakes they feel that they have made,
or their personal shortcomings.
A client might perhaps not be aware of mistakes they are making and simply talk about their
problems.
The scolder is then expected to give the client a dose of reality and advice on how to straighten
things out, typically in a forceful and very matter-of-fact way.
While this probably seems more than a bit strange, it might in fact be a genius service-
after all how many powerful CEOs or managers have anyone in their live that will bluntly
tell them what they are doing wrong without fear of repercussions?
Rental apologies, the reverse of rental scoldings, are another service offered by Japan's decidedly
unorthodox rent-a-family industry.
Here clients can hire actors to basically take the heat for them, and the schemes can
become very elaborate indeed.
For example a client may have made a mistake at work and have to deal with an irate customer,
so the client simply hires a fake supervisor to apologize profusely to the customer.
If that doesn't work, a different actor will be sent to act as the division head, and if
that doesn't work then a very remorseful and apologetic company president will be sent.
Because the real department heads and presidents aren't aware of this however, situations can
get very complicated.
Sometimes though an offended customer may not have actually met the offending employee,
in which case one can simply hire an employee who then comes in and takes the heat, all
the while the fake employee grovels on the floor begging forgiveness.
This can be stressful for the actor involved however, as they are often severely verbally
berated, and doing this as a full time job certainly can't be pleasant.
Less pleasant though would be when actors are hired to sort out romantic affairs, a
service which of course is available.
An angry husband or wife may demand a personal apology from their wife or husband's lover,
and in this case one can simply hire an actor to play the role.
If the other lover is married though the husband or wife who was cheated on may demand to meet
with both the lover and the lover's significant other, forcing a confrontation that they may
hope will destroy that marriage as well.
In this case one can hire not just a fake lover, but the wife or husband of their fake
lover as well, and like an elaborate stage play, sit by while their own angry husband
or wife takes out their anger on the fake couple, then watches as the fake couple fights
amongst themselves.
Japan's rent-a-family industry is certainly strange by our western standards, yet in many
ways it actually makes a lot of sense and may fill a vital role for many people.
For lonely westerners who may not be socially adept, or perhaps are struggling to recover
after a traumatic romantic experience, their only options for companionship is often to
rely on the dangerous and often illegal prostitution industry.
While some men and women may legitimately be looking for physical companionship, it's
clear that a much larger desire for emotional companionship exists, and in Japan that need
is easily fulfilled by the very strange yet fascinating Rent-a-Family industry.
Would you ever rent a family member for any reason?
Would a fake family member ever have helped get you out of a jam?
Also, check out our other video, Why is Japans Population Decreasing?!
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